Author Archives: Arizona Capitol Reports Staff

Although he was called “judge” in Tucson, Alfred John Emery had no legal training and never sat as a judge. The title was honorific. In fact, Emery was a dairy and poultry farmer all his life, and a man with ...

This is Andy Matson of Pinewood Dairy standing by his truck in Flagstaff trying to make a delivery. It is February 1949 and the white wall behind him and his customers is a huge snow bank. From December 22, 1948, ...

In 1881, Henry Lesinsky, one of the owners of the Arizona Copper Company in Clifton, recorded the arrival of some foreign investors, “. . . a party of Englishmen and Scotchmen (sic) came our way. They had bought some mines ...

This busy scene is a research camp at Pierce’s Ferry on the Colorado River in 1935. The barge, which looks as though it might once have been a ferry, is tied up where the river leaves the Grand Canyon and ...

Theresa settled in Philadelphia with her husband Mike, who was also an immigrant and a miner in the Pennsylvania coal fields. Charles went to Phoenix, where he earned a living selling oranges for a nickel a piece on Washington Street. ...

Owned by Jim Vizina, its bar and restaurant rented to Cochise County Supervisor M.E. (Milt) Joyce, the Oriental was considered Tombstone’s finest saloon. “Last evening,” wrote the Tombstone Epitaph, about the opening in 1880, “the portals were thrown open and ...

This is Immaculate Heart Church and the church school on East Washington Street in downtown Phoenix about the time the church was dedicated—December 15, 1928. It was a separate church for Phoenix’s Mexican-American and Mexican Catholics who had split from ...

This is Main Street in Bisbee on January 21, 1916, the day after the biggest snowfall in city history. The storm began on January 19 with heavy winds that tore off roofs in the Warren District. The wind abated, the sky cleared briefly—then it began to rain. The streets soon ran like rivers. The sky cleared again in the afternoon, but by 5 p.m. snow began to fall, increasing throughout the night until by morning all of southern Arizona from Benson to the Mexican border was blanketed.

During World War I, there would have been no young men in this photo—most had been sent overseas. But by 1920, the boys were back, the economy was beginning to boom, dating was in style again and the Confection Den was one of the places to go.

This is Tucson pop star Linda Ronstadt’s great aunt in a publicity photo taken in the 1920s. Her stage name was Luisa Espinel. She was a national entertainer—a contralto who performed opera, sang Spanish folk songs and acted in movies.